Imagine yourself in a coffee shop ordering your favorite Iced Latte variation. The time it takes from chattering up the cute barista girl up until she solidifies her interest in you with a genuine wink, flies by so quickly that even the slightest thought about looking at the time might leave your coffee after lunch a bit stale. Now let’s back track to the beginning. What if you could order a fresh cup of Vanilla Iced Mocha Brave, a grande size that is, in less than 10 seconds. You would have your hands instantly wrapped around that warm paper shape that our palms have subconsciously reinforced; the caffeine craving. A sudden upgrade of such magnitude would surely increase the sales of coffee, hardly soporific, no pun intended. I like to compare this thought to the internet. Coffee and the Internet have become synonymous in many ways. For example, we want our coffee to be hot; internet to be ready, (no logging in, inputting password). Next, we want our coffee tasting somewhat pleasant, at least for the $5 you would’ve have otherwise spent on a gallon of gas to take the long way home from work after a bad day. This I would refer to as Internet connectivity; disconnects, sudden bandwidth issues, reliability. And finally the time it takes to receive your fresh cup as speed, pure internet speed. Hehehe. Sorry for all this Coffee talk, let’s get down to brass tax. British scientists have discovered a way of using Graphene, the thinnest material in the world, to capture and convert light than any other material used for the same technology; internet speed. The process could increase performance capacity of current speeds (avg: 100mps) by over 200 times. That means you could download a 2 gigabyte file, in one second.
In previous experiments, a solar cell that generates electricity was created by laying out two closely spaced metallic wires on top of grapheme and exposing it to light. This process however was found to be low efficient as grapheme only absorbs 3% of light. Fortunately, a research team in England has solved this problem by combining graphene with tiny plasmonic nanostructures. This enhanced the performance of graphene by 20 times. Although still at its infant stage, this is a brand new step for the future of the internet.
